#Ukraines #grain #ship #docks #Turkey #turned
The first grain ship to leave Ukraine under a United Nations-backed deal last week docked in Turkey on Wednesday, maritime authorities showed, after a report said it had finally found a buyer for its corn.
The Sierra Leonean-flagged ship Razoni left the Ukrainian port of Odessa with 26,000 tons of corn on August 1 and was due to dock in the Lebanese port of Tripoli last weekend.
But Ukrainian officials said the five-month delay in delivery caused by the Russian invasion prompted the Lebanese buyer to cancel the deal once the ship was already at sea.
Maritime locations showed that the Razoni was docked in Turkey’s Mediterranean port of Mersin after being anchored just offshore for several days.
The news site Middle East Eye quotes a shipper as saying a Turkish buyer has been found for the corn.
The “cargo sold… will be unloaded in Mersin,” Ashram Maritime Agency’s Ahmed al-Fares told the news site.
An agreement signed by the warring parties with officials from the United Nations and Turkey in Istanbul last month lifted a Russian blockade of Ukrainian ports and established secure corridors through Kyiv-laid mines to repel any Moscow amphibious assault.
The top UN official overseeing the deal said on Wednesday that the first 12 ships to leave Ukrainian ports under the deal mostly transported corn instead of wheat, as that was the crop in production at the time of the Russian invasion silos was stored.
“We’re actually switching to wheat,” Frederick Kenney told reporters.
“We released the first ship bound for Ukraine through the Bosphorus to pick up the wheat,” he said. “That should happen sometime next week.”
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